latex to pdf

i use tetex and texshop. everything was installed without any problems and according to the documentation. almost evereything works fine but

the pdf that latex creates looks terrible on the screen.

it's hardly readable. it seems as if a font was missing, even thought latex does not complain about not finding the fonts. I'm trying to latex manuals that come from solaris unix computers? this problem is persists no matter which pdf-viewer i use (ie acrobat reader, preview, texshop). other pdf-documents (ie downloaded manuals, those that come with acrobat) look fine.

Okay, what about the rest? I'm interested in those three little dots you put there... Let's see the complete .log file!
Why don't you post the .tex file you were processing? I'll pdfTeX it as well, and we'll compare the .log files.

% --------------------------------------------------------------------------
\section{Goal of this document}

This is the reference manual for the ACL library for the C programming
language. ACL stands for A Container Library --- admttedly a poorly
chosen name. It provides a set of abstract container data types.

The ACL library is copyright The DAWAI Team; it is distributed under
the GNU General Publice License Version~2. You should have received a
copy of the GPL with the software.

The maintainers of this software can be contacted at the following
email address:
\verb|acllib@nats.informatik.uni-hamburg.de|.

I think I found it. When I TeXed your source I noticed metafont had to make pk-files for every single font used. That's of course because you ask for this non-standard encoding in the second and the third line. This forces TeX to use the ec fonts, and to rasterize them from their metafont sources. If you omit those lines, comment them out for instance, you allow TeX to use the usual cm fonts, and those come in postscript format, thanks to BlueSky, so those are anti-aliased at any size, whereas the ec fonts are rasterized at 600 dpi but don't look nice on the screen. If you print them they'll probably look al lot better.
Solution/workaround 1: omit the second and the third line. I'm not a TeX-guru, so I don't know what else will change. Perhaps some glyphs will fail to show up or something.
Solution 2: print your pdf on a 600 dpi printer.

i havn't really checked if any unwanted sideeffects occur but it looks fine.

thanx. you definitely seem to be on the verge of being a texguru.

this actually the first time i really use latex on os x. since i never saw it any different i was believing this was due to something rare and hidden deep in the implemetation of darwin, but hell no, i'm happy.

cheers.

couzteau

ps: you were right. the pdf was printing fine, but most of the time i read these documents on the screen.